I'm a geochemist. In the past ten years I've fixed mass spectrometers, blasted sapphires with a laser beam, explored for uranium in a nature reserve, and measured growth patterns in fish ears, and helped design the next generation of the world's most advanced ion probe. My main interest is in-situ mass spectrometry, but I have a soft spot in my heart for thermodynamics, drillers, and cosmochemistry.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Here in Canberra,
the “Science meets Parliament” event is running. I am not attending- the luminaries and power
players can do their thing, but out on the wrong side of the tracks, our
factory needs to keep putting lasers on sharks for the good of the economy. Luckily, some of the scientists there have
taken to twitter, so snippets and thoughts are able to escape. Given that engagement is one of the things on
their agenda, I thought I would chime in.

One of the topics mentioned was non-academic careers for
recently graduated science PhD holders.
As someone who has worked in academia, industry, and government since
graduating a long long time ago, I figured I’d take the opportunity to chime in
with my two cents. Note, however, that
this is only 0.000022% of the attendance fee for the event, so discount this
advice accordingly.

As a result of the deprofessionalization of science, there are
no longer copious private sector basic research jobs for scientists to graduate
into. They do still exist, but not
nearly in the numbers required to take all the PhD students who are excess to
the requirements of the academic machine.

The other problem with this retreat by science into the
ivory towers of academia is that people in the real world- including employers-
are less likely to really understand what scientists do, and what specifically
a PhD graduate has to offer.

When a person leaves university with their PhD in hand, they
generally have three things: A tacky
outfit (gown, hat, etc), a body of in-depth knowledge that makes them the world
expert in a very small field of study, and the ability to do research. Only the third of these is a salable skill,
except in extraordinary conditions. This puts students leaving academia in a
very different boat than those continuing on to a post-doc, where expanding or
leveraging your field of PhD study (the second thing) is standard practice.

As a result, PhD-holding job seekers can be a bit
disoriented. This leads to all sorts of
sad situations, including those where graduates leave their degrees off of
their CV’s in hopes that this makes them more employable. However, this is a suboptimal solution.

Furthermore, being able to figure things out which aren’t
known is a really useful skill in a variety of situations. Even with Wikipedia in our phones,
understanding basic derivations lets us estimate things faster than fingers can
tap screens. It lets us solve problems that may not have ready solutions
published in a publically available place; it lets us adapt to changing
circumstances where the underlying issues are constant, but the specific
combinations of problems is changing in a way that makes simply looking up a
solution impossible. Being able to
figure out how the world works is a useful, marketable skill, but to be
valuable to us we need to make sure that we don’t devalue it.

There are a few things that scientists entering the normal
workforce need to remember. Firstly, in
private enterprise, time is money. There
is a bad habit in poorly supervised PhD programs to devalue a student’s time-
basically tell them to take however long it takes them to do some particular
task. In private enterprise, where the
accountants will be tracking your billable hours and balancing project budgets,
it is very important to use time effectively.
Ask for help, communicate with your colleagues, copy what your
predecessor did; all of these things are preferable to spending a week proving
that you can independently derive shit.

The corollary to this point is that you need to value your
time, and make your employer and clients value it as well. Earning a PhD takes years of study and
effort- an outlay similar to becoming a doctor or a lawyer as a postgraduate course
of study. Business people generally assume that things are- to some extent-
worth what they cost; a person who charges himself out at marginally more than
grad school rates will give the impression that he has little to offer.

Of course, the academic meatgrinder doesn’t want any of this
to happen. As long as academia thinks of
PhD programs as molds for the next generation of instructors to be injected
into, it will try to make them as cheap as possible. This is why PhD graduate supply is high,
demand is low, and employment tactics like adjuncting place downward pressure
on wages and conditions. Universities
don’t want PhD’s to succeed; that will cost them money down the road.

Luckily, those of us in the Earth Sciences are in a position
where, at least in Australia,
there are plenty of other opportunities around.
Impoverishing your students only makes sense if you plan on eventually
hiring them; if most of them are destined for careers outside of academia, then
an academic institution gets the most benefit by having graduates get rich enough
that they want to give money back to their schools. If enough scientists become
professionals of some description or another, then the schools will eventually think
of use as being more like lawyers than English majors, catch on, and put some
effort into professional development of research students. Until then, though, it is up to us to help
each other.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Good thoughts. One challenge is convincing post-grads themselves that not everyone will become a Professor and they need to think about life outside of academia. Several years ago I was in a lecture hall packed with post-grads where a Dean of Research very bluntly told everyone that none of us would ever get tenure because it was becoming an extinct concept. I believed him and took a chance to get the hell out, but most of my colleagues that day kept believing that somehow, if they just wrote another paper or three that semester or picked up another lecturing gig at half-pay they would one day be the lucky one to get the golden chair in the ivory tower when Professor Nearly Dead White Guy finally retired.

There was some professional development tentatively creeping in toward the end of my academic time and it would interesting to know if that is a more fixed part of the curriculum now. I would suspect that, like many large tradition-based organisations, it has been slow going because the new ideas and training gets thrown on the bottom of the pyramid in an ad-hoc take-it-or-leave-it kind of way rather than where it's really needed at the top. Hard to get traction with professional development if after a few days you return to your desk and your supervisor and their peers aren't the slightest bit interested in what you've learnt...

The fundamental problem is that many academics have little respect for industry workers, and many industry managers have little respect for academics, so they spend too much time sneering at each other to maximize their shared untility.

Disclaimer:

All opinions, measurements, figures, and facts on this page are the personal opinions of Charles W. Magee, Jr, and do not represent the views of any of his employers: past, present, present-but-about-to-be-past, or future. None of the content herein has been subject to peer review, and should be treated with caution or derision. Any passing mention of OSHA code violations, criminal activities, unethical or unscientific behavior, or the clandestine Australian nuclear weapons program are fictions created to make rhetorical points, and do not represent the reality of my, or anyone else's, workplace. Do not attempt any scientific protocols described herein at home, with the exception of the chocolate chip cookie recipe. Do not apply the products of that protocol to individuals with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or cholesterol, egg, wheat, dairy, or chocolate allergies. Do not view this blog continuously for more than 45 minutes without stretching and taking other precautions to prevent computer-related chronic injury.

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